When I see diversity-casting in commercials—two bland Caucasians waving beer cans at a TV, or at a driving up to a Taco Bell window, accompanied, somehow, by a handsome black guy—the word that pops into my head is “segregation”! I can’t help it. The ruse is so obvious, a counterfactual posing as a home truth. Then I watch the black guy for signs that he shares my disquiet, and sometimes I think I can see it in his eyes, a veiled chagrin at both his company and the bald contrivance that roped him into it. He seems to be asking himself, By what unholy mix of demographic calculation and liberal-wish projection have I ended up wedged in the front seat of a little car between these two pinkish fellows? In their morbidly color-conscious color-blindness, these commercials are like the stereotypical white guy who thinks some slogan has flung him to the magical land beyond race—Peter Riegert in “Animal House,” yelling “Hey Otis, my man!” onto a dance floor packed with the skeptical black people of 1962. By pretending it isn’t so hard, he just reminds you how hard it really is.
It’s a painful irony of race relations in America that they command, or at least warrant and generally repay, a degree of critical reflection that can render a guy unable to actually have race relations, even—or perhaps especially—with those most similar to him, men that he might, but for the fathomless black-white thing, be friends with. Michael Chabon seems to have this dilemma in mind when, in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” he writes, “Apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any two men.” There are no African-Americans in Chabon’s Yiddish Alaska, but America’s black-white gulf is surely the truest application of his formula. To confirm this, just look at the larger social demography of your own racially mixed home town. Then compare it with that of the chess tables in its city parks, and that of its gay bars.
So, since Chabon gives us a literal chasm as our problem, how would he map our passage over it? What, if not chess or homosexuality, underlies the stubborn fellowship between the characters in his sharp and hilarious new novel, “Telegraph Avenue,” in which a black couple and a white couple, best friends and business partners, struggle to stay together when their shared worlds crack apart. Troy Patterson, of Slate, is one of the many critics who, while conceding its brimming virtuosity, have puzzled over the optimism about race in “Telegraph Avenue.” Patterson finds his answer by looking at the biography printed on the back flap of the novel. The novelist, Patterson deadpans, “lives in Berkeley.”
Patterson is being glib, of course, but he might be onto something in bringing up California geography, though if there’s a city that explains Chabon’s suspiciously good attitude, he has the wrong one fingered. The relevant city isn’t hippie Berkeley, where Michael Chabon has been sampling the hallucinogenic arugula or something. It’s scrappy Oakland, where, in the novel, a pair of best friends named Archy Stallings (African-American) and Nat Jaffe (white, Jewish) share a quixotic partnership in hopeless Brokeland Records, while, over in Berkeley, their wives Aviva and Gwen, also best friends, run a midwife business. Chabon withholds any strong sociological claims about Oakland, but his novel evokes the city’s real racial folkways, the oddly winning blend of prickliness and sociability that I noticed on moving there myself, in August, 2004, the month in which the novel is set.
The novel’s title is a sly misdirection and perhaps, as such, a sort of Socratic lesson in the practice of reading it. For anyone with passing knowledge of the Bay Area, “Telegraph Avenue” signifies “Cal Berkeley.” It’s the famous street that ends at Cal’s Sather Gate, where all that stuff happened in the sixties, and, at this historic terminus of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, “Telegraph Avenue” spends precisely zero time. Chabon’s stretch of Telegraph is 2.4 miles to the south, about a mile inside the Oakland line, where it anchors a scruffy neighborhood known as Lower Temescal.
Brokeland Records sits in a little space on Telegraph previously home to a row of barber chairs, and, Archy and Nat like to think, it continues the barbershop tradition of manly loitering and banter. Like much of Chabon’s fiction, then, “Telegraph Avenue” is about the problems of men, and especially the problems of fatherhood. It unspools a three-generation drama of fathers and sons, at the center of which, in the second generation, stands Archy, who holds this position with heroic unsteadiness. Archy Stallings is the black Achilles of procrastination. The wheels of Fate turn on his ambivalence. The novel, though, is also about friendship, especially the friendship of black men and white men, and the deeper agonies of that arrangement fall largely on Nat. Archy does worry, in his indecisive register, about losing Nat—when a black businessman plays on racial solidarity to lure him away from their partnership, when their wives fall out over a doctor’s racist comment. Nat, though, starts to wonder if what they’re doing is possible at all, if they’ve been flouting some law of nature in pulling it off for the last thirteen years.
When Chabon reveals that Nat was raised by a black stepmother who taught him to cook soul food, and that he grew up among black kids in the poor and violent East Bay city of Richmond, I was disappointed. At first, I thought he was taking a shortcut, tidying up his racial anthropology by making Nat an honorary black guy. But Chabon’s actually raising the stakes. He’s asking, If Nat can’t have a black guy as a best friend, who can? Maybe we should start with the best-case scenario and go from there. The optimism, in other words, is highly conditional. Nat was born, then extensively retrofitted, to make his way in the ghetto. He’s the Bionic White Man. He’s naturally gruff and confrontational, macho in spite of himself, a leftist who still gets in fistfights, married to a feminist midwife. Before he met his Jewish Aviva, he dated and lusted after black women exclusively. He began his life battling for respect from black boys, and now, though he’s manic and paranoid and so trips out on a lot of things, he doesn’t trip out on whether black men accept him. He assumes they do, and, for the most part, they do—and, for the other part, he doesn’t care.
One thing he does care about, and trip out on, is how other white men present themselves. A regular at Brokeland is a rotund white lawyer who goes by the nickname Moby. Moby pimp-walks in the door, and in his cheap suit and bad shoes and weird white-guy haircut, addresses everyone “like he was from the ’hood.” Archy thinks that Moby tries a little too hard, maybe, but pegs him as “a sweet-natured white guy from Indiana.” For Nat, though, Moby embodies his personal hell, the pit of obsequious whiteness he’s spent his whole life sidestepping. As an Oakland transplant, I take two things from this. First, Moby’s sheer familiarity, the fact that he keeps coming around and being nice and holding up his end of the conversation, wins him sufficient goodwill from his fellow-Oaklanders, despite his Ebonics excesses. Second, if he was originally from Oakland, he probably wouldn’t have to act that way.
When I moved from Washington to Oakland’s Lake Merritt neighborhood eight years ago, I was a writer with a conservative paper-trail on race, and my new city gave me a happy shock. I shared the conservative view that identity politics and militant race-consciousness are polarizing and self-perpetuating. Yet here I was in the city of the Black Panthers, a city with a most bitter history of racial politics, which was still playing out on a range of issues. If any city should have been polarized by a hyperawareness of race, it was Oakland. But what I found was the most socially integrated American city I’d ever seen, by far—restaurants, cafés, crowded sidewalks, farmers’ markets, romantic couples and whole happy families, scenes apparently stage-managed by the Diversity Director in God’s own Human Resources Department. I’ve heard some theories about why it’s like this, and I have a few of my own, but my immediate fascination is how it seems to happen, especially among men, who, even in the easiest circumstances, always have that Chabonian gulf to get across.
It’s said that in America everyone thinks he’s middle class. In Oakland, though, the men you see on the street, precisely in the bourgeois commercial districts, and especially those who were born here, all seem to think they’re stevedores. Maybe it’s the city’s grim industrial past, or the East Bay’s communal grudge against San Francisco, or the fact that men of both races have infamous home-town role models (in the Panthers and Hell’s Angels), or, indeed, its long history of bare-knuckle politics, in which race remained explicit but lost some of its power to confound honest conversation. Maybe it’s Al Davis and the Raiders. I don’t know. But there’s an Oakland tough-guy sensibility that black and white men wear like a satin warmup jacket. For older men of both races, it seems to give them a common idiom, a way of being together in their city: two men riding the same basic swagger out of Peet’s, in the same basic wraparound sunglasses, shooting the shit on a bench in the same educated-badass inflections, and then getting into their respective B.M.W.s and driving off to live their lives as retired lawyers, in their separate neighborhoods in the Hills.
In “Telegraph Avenue,” Michael Chabon’s characters join with the giddy excess and unlikely rigor of his prose to mount a sort of meta-argument that we might bridge racial distance using the skills found in our bigger-hearted novelists—imaginative sympathy, attention to the hidden, particular sources of affection and resentment, a loving slowness to judge. Within the confines of “Telegraph Avenue,” in the slightly carbonated atmosphere that its characters breathe, this meta-argument is both delightful to entertain and fully persuasive.
Still, in the non-fictional world, with its largely uncarbonated atmosphere, the novelist’s sympathy would seem to need some precondition, lest it meet with suspicion or contempt. Across “the gulf that separates any two men,” especially as it yawns between white men and black men in America, the aspect of understanding, the warm expression that says, “Hey, dude, I’m not here to judge,” might be read as condescending or weak, or perhaps as an unearned intimacy. A man can either court these disqualifications directly or he can disqualify himself by tumbling into the regress of these reasonable thoughts, and appearing lame that way. He needs something else. On that score, it strengthens the possibilities conjured in “Telegraph Avenue”—deep friendship between black men and white men, undeformed by neurosis, or suspicion, or cheesy stratagems of pretending to be each other—that its urban core, the capitol of its cranky little civilization, is Oakland.
Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty.
